When you spend many hours a day reading and writing the eyes become an asset one needs to preserve. Having discovered economics and philosophy podcasts I looked for something on history that I could listen to when the eyes were shot but the brain was not. In the late 1990s I loved to listen to a talk radio show in which a doctor read and discussed medical journals. Unfortunately most talk radio is political and partisan so I have ceased listening. The new crop of internet podcast stations have, in a way, taking us back to the 1930s, to an audio matrix which is in some ways as old as the campfire.
Mister Carlin’s catalog is extensive. He also has references and purchasing information for books on topics related to his podcasts. His big recent project is many hours long, available in five segments, and is titled The Wrath of The Khans, about good old Genghis, granddaddy to a half billion humans. I sampled the first episode and found the style to be agreeable, although I would prefer something more condensed. Dan uses significant chunks of narrative providing context and analogies that will enable the modern person unread in the subject he is discussing to grasp the significance and nature of the events from within our own fairly ignorant framework. This can be a bit redundant if you are well-read in the area. But if you are new to the subject it makes the podcast fully intelligible.
The entire episode that I have listened to is Prophets of Doom [4 hours, 28 minutes]. This podcast concerns the Protestant Reformation and the Anabaptists. The setup, explaining the significance of the Catholic Church in medieval times, takes a solid hour. Dan really won me over when he equated Martin Luther’s efforts to question the ruling order through seditious publications of bulletins and translations of the Bible to the current efforts by American traitors to publish U.S. Military and Intelligence documents. Dan tells a good story, making sure never to let the narrative thread of distant events lose contact with our current state of affairs. ‘The third baptism’ refers to the execution by drowning of Anabaptist heretics.
Hardcore History is an awesome learning resource, as well as a way to while away a few passive hours without being intellectually sodomized by the current propaganda. There are two links on our network page.
